Before I go full tilt, I want to preface three things, First that I have genuinely enjoyed this game since it's launch in 2017, I have over 4600 hours combined from battle.net and Steam. I meant some great friends through a destiny dad group, I got some of my own friends into the game; i loved this game and it brought me great joy. Second, telling me to "just quit if you're not having fun" is a bad faith take and isn't paying attention to my concerns and argument. third, if you say, "well just take a break from the game" I regularly do this to not cause self induced burn out. But I am at my wits end with this game. After the mass layoff after TFS, this left a bad taste in a lot of my friends mouths and they dropped off entirely cause I think they saw the storm on the horizon coming. I however kept playing, generally enjoying TFS year's worth of content and loot even if it was by myself. I started playing the game alone back in 2017 so with EoF was coming out, i was ok with continuing to play solo, using LFG finders for stuff, and the new portal system felt like a good middle ground to play with a larger pool of people. However, over the past two weeks, this game is not fun anymore. The grind in the portal is monotonous, the gear and weapons are generally uninspiring, the "sunsetting" of old gear, weapons, and content is DEEPLY destressing and feels terrible, and that's not to say for the increasingly push of microtransactions in eververse to the point where it feels like there are more Paid armor sets than one you can naturally earn in playing the game. I understand a live-service game like D2 needs to evolve, but this feels like a de-evolution, and I keep asking myself "Who is this game for anymore?" It doesn't feel like it's for new players the UI continues to be unintuitive and directionless. Even back before the new light experience was out there were several people who tried the game saw how convoluted the UI and new player exp was, got frustrated at the lack of direction and just quit. Even with the portal and the EoF campaign being front and center, there isn't much in the way of understanding the overall narrative of this game. vaulting - then LOSING the Red War campaign, along with vaulting CoO, Warmind, most of Forsaken, and now Shadowkeep and Beyond Light are relatively pointless in the grand narrative of this game. I can pick up Warframe, FFXIV, Lost Epoch, or nearly any other mmo/live service game and play from the beginning, get a sense and scope of the game's world, characters, and so on. But if you haven't been playing the game regularly since 2017 you are outta luck, and as a veteran player that is disconcerting because it's nearly impossible to recommend this game to new players. speaking of veteran players... This game doesn't feel built for veteran players either. Old content- gear, armor, weapons, activities, etc. get vaulted and sunset to the point of obscurity so everything you have earned or keep no longer is viable, relevant, or worthwhile. Then the reversal of the sunsetting of weapons felt terrible because i got rid of some great weapons cause they were deemed irrelevant by the devs, but if i held onto them they are kinda, but not really relevant now? Then with the new systems in place to promote using new gear, which on paper is a great idea, but in practice it's incredibly limiting and pushes a specific pve meta into an even tighter play space, making any build crafting limited due to certain exotics being "featured" in a season. Once again, the idea is great but if you like running certain builds with non-feature gear/weapons, then you get locked out of A LOT of matchmaking content that has the avant garde modifier, so you are forced to use only want Bungie has deemed worthy for that season. I understand that this can rotate season-to-season, but creating a hard block feels bad as a veteran player. On the topic of modifiers and the grind in the portal, I now and mostly considered myself a causal, but long time player. I never liked doing super difficult content because I don't find it enjoyable. I like to play video games for fun and relaxation. I don't have any ego in trying to prove to the world I soloed RoN or something similar. I think those options being in the game for players that want to do that is fantastic and genuinely impressive. As i have been playing through this season of EoF I feel like as I have been climbing the ladder of difficulty options in the portal I have hit a plateau. And for any other season, expansion, or other content that would be fine cause I knew what my limits of play were to both feel a challenge in the game but still be enjoyable. But this plateau feels different as I'm closing in on 380 power, the content difficulty feels cheesy, cheap, and uninspiring. Having enemies with absurd health pools, modifiers like grappler ruining entire play styles and builds, and having solo content with harsh constraints like limited revives and then losing all those revives earned due to an arbitrary timer does not instill a great sense of play. I hit a plateau that now says, "Ok now play fast, but do it with incredibly precision and if you fail you have to do it all over again." I don't have time or the desire to do that. I know the meme of, "I'm a dad that works ten jobs, and only have 10 minutes of free time" could easily be thrown here in a cynical and flippant way, but I truly do not want to waste my time replaying the same old content for meager rewards and progression. With Power Progression, at first I was fine with the climb to 200, and even up to 300. But once I hit around 320-350, the slow down of progression was significant. To the point that despite doing pinnacle content, with harder modifiers, and finding LFGs to run content, I barely make progress in a meaningful way. The grind, truly sucks. i don't want to play Caldera 100 times to progress "optimally" or play something so difficult it feels like a chore. This is also to say all past content is just irrelevant to play whatsoever. Dungeons and Raids aren't featured in the portal and I do understand why Raids might not be yet, but we just had Rite of the Nine with explorer and matchmade modes to give players, new and old the chance to experience more of the game, why are those dungeon not in pinnacle ops? When was the last time anyone did Dare of Eternity? Wellspring? or anything of similar matchmaking activities in the game. So much of this game have been rendered irrelevant, like collapsing a highway into a dirt road and expecting traffic to move along the same. I should probably close this all up, but i have had so many thoughts that i needed to collect about this game over the past year, hoping in my hear of hearts, that Bungie would do right by the game, players new and old, and that upper management would do right by the game devs. But that doesn't feel like the case anymore. I know i used the word irrelevant many times throughout this, but I truly feel like that's what this game is becoming, irrelevant. Maybe the real Destiny killer all along was Destiny itself. If you read all the way through, thank you I appreciate your attention.